"Say Independence Day Is Better & It Will Be The Last Words You Speak"

We may all be dead by the time someone manages the strength to make an actual film about the attacks of September 11. Hopefully it will be from natural causes instead of subsequent terrorist action, but it will probably take a good half-century before Bruckheimer Jr. greenlights it. In the meantime we can metaphor-osis the tragedy and pick around the scabs to find the true horror of what it begot; immediate and long-term. The idea of Steven Spielberg and all the toys at his vast disposal finally throwing down with the dark side of an alien invasion rattles all the imagination and excitement that a moviefan could muster. By keeping a worldwide attack through the eyes of just a few, Spielberg has created one of the most terrifying and unsettling films in years.

The eyes of the few fall to the estranged Ferrier family. Ray (Tom Cruise) isn’t much for the fathering thing and only sees his children on weekends. Robbie (Justin Chatwin) is the rebellious teenager and Rachel (Dakota Fanning) is the inquisitive one with just enough quirks to drive daddy batty. This particular weekend, the lightning storms that have been getting national media attention begin striking right in the middle of town, knocking out all power much like a nuclear blast would. What those bolts of electricity carried with it is a nightmare that few will be able to run from.

After a first wave attack by a monstrous, mechanical tripod walker that would have George Lucas’ AT-ATs running in the other direction, Ray packs his family up and makes a desperate run for their lives in the town’s one post-EMP repaired car. Soon discovering that this wasn’t an isolated incident, options become scarce. Ray desperately wants to get the kids to their mother (Miranda Otto) visiting family in Boston and Robbie’s anger begins to translate into a need to fight back.

Spielberg and crew made the conscious decision to internalize this story rather than revel in what they could do with destroying famous landmarks for an audience’s thirst for the spectacular. And it’s a brilliant one. When creating a tragedy of such epic proportions the last thing you need is an audience applauding at the destruction of the White House. And when it comes to going mano-a-mano with the aliens, once they have established an impenetrable defense mechanism the battle has already been decided. We’re on the losing end and the only thing left is staying alive, so there’s no time to waste. Survival can be a powerful drug and when our backs are up against it, the nature of human will is hardly a triumph.

There are a handful of major set pieces within War of the Worlds. Nobody will be able to forget the first attack which is one of the scariest sequences Spielberg has ever filmed. But between the advancing alien hordes are moments of intense terror that he specializes in. The crowding of a car, the cat-and-mouse games that he made textbook in Jurassic Park and Minority Report and a sound design that amplifies the horror to a perfection we haven’t seen since Robert Wise’s The Haunting. If this film doesn’t win the Best Sound and Sound Effects Oscars this year, eliminate the categories. On top of that, he finds dread where we least expect it; in a bravura, unbroken shot that goes overhead, into the car and out again as the Ferriers flee the city with the pressures of fatherhood at its most traumatic or a moment of truth where Ray must go to extreme lengths to protect Rachel at any cost.

The immediacy of the events dictate the disorientation of time over how long the characters must live through this. How many of us lost that whole week after 9/11? There’s an epidemic of shock which runs through how Ray and others respond to what’s happening? When he returns, battered and covered in ash from the primary attack, Rachel asks instinctively, “is it the terrorists?” The ash, a clear reminder of the images of that fateful day, translates into something more grisly since we know it’s not the remains of architecture, but people (not unlike the fires of Schindler’s List).

Where Independence Day created a disaster film of serious idiocy, David Koepp and Josh Friedman’s screenplay has far more meat while managing to maintain its epic outreach. You can run, fight or die in this world. Running isn’t necessarily cowardly and rushing into fight seems more foolish than heroic. Robbie desperately wants to get into the fight; but are his motives dictated by a willingness to help or a desire to become a better man than his father? Is fighting back as delusional as the character of Ogilvy (Tim Robbins) make it seem when “it’s not a war, but an extermination?” It’s like the flipside of Shawshank’s redemption with hope completely died out and the Robbins character brought on to madness in his confined space coupled with a more sinister narration by Morgan Freeman (who is doing as much narrating these days as Liam Neeson is playing mentors.)

Those unprepared by the original source material will surely have a few ill-tempered words for the resolution. (Mine come not from that, but from an ending that’s not quite as tragic as it should have been.) This isn’t space opera nor a good-vs.-evil situation where an action finale (save for the end of all days) is plausible. But what is? For the world to end or the optimism that the enemies who have slept within our planet’s natural resources could also become our greatest ally? Personally I put my faith in the actual viruses rather than the cock-and-balls computer virus that Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich concocted with a straight face or the “what a world” Achille’s Heel of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs.

I would rather not entertain the recent frenzy that Tom Cruise has caused over the past few months in the area where tabloid sensation has become journalism, so I’ll just stick to the plain fact. He is flat-out terrific in War of the Worlds; unafraid to put on the deadbeat hat with such authority only to slowly find redemption through utter shame and force. The sometimes creepy phenomenon known as 11-year old Dakota Fanning matches him with an extraordinary balance of the wise-beyond-her-years performance we’re used to from her with the fright of a disturbed child whose screaming can pierce nerves and spring you into action. Bottom line: Don’t be a dolt and boycott for whatever reason you have concerning Cruise. He’s a man. He’s also an actor and a damn fine one. And it’s the actor who is up on screen consistently making smart choices and wouldn’t do a project if it wasn’t destined to entertain millions of people looking for intelligent and thrilling entertainment.

Spielberg has now made two statement films about 9/11 in a row. The Terminal was a thinly veiled and misunderstood satire of 9/11 paranoia and his next, Vengeance, deals with the hunt for the 1972 Munich Olympic terrorists. After which he shall have a trilogy in different genres that indirectly deal with our reactions, large and small, to what happened in 2001. War of the Worlds is the anti-(insert any film to rip off H.G. Wells since the 1953 original), a disturbing first-hand account of Earth being thrown into the fan from a filmmaker full of optimism for the planet and its people, but ready to take the darkness of our existence to places we may not be ready to confront. Better now than in another 50 years.